EDITORIAL ROUNDUP: On the shooting at The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland

Gatehouse Media Wire

Friday

Jun 29, 2018 at 5:30 PM

A roundup of editorials from Gatehouse Media sites on Thursday's shooting in Annapolis, Maryland, that killed five journalists at the city's newspaper, The Capital Gazette.

Mike Kuhns, Stroudsburg (Pa.) Pocono Record executive editor

I remember the anger.

I remember the sadness.

But what I remember most about 9/11 was the unity of the country.

It was one of the few times in my lifetime where I felt neighbors cared about one another. The color of your skin didn’t matter, family rifts were forgotten, co-workers bonded like never before.

The country – from shore to shore – cared about one thing and that was about being one in a time of crisis. We supported each other – friends and strangers alike. That’s the feeling today on the heels of a random shooting which left five journalists dead at the Capital Gazette on Thursday afternoon.

Five lives lost, because a man – Jarrod Ramos – is charged with five murders after he became upset when the paper published his charges of threatening and harassing a woman on Facebook. He sued the paper six years ago and lost.

Some have understandably grown numb to public shootings. Our schools have been targeted, our churches, concerts and nightclubs, making us all feel like the secure world we once knew is slowly crumbling away.

We all read the news of various shootings – 58 people killed last fall during a Las Vegas concert, 32 killed in a 2007 Virginia Tech shooting rampage, 27 killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 – and each time we ask when it will all end?

It’s not ending, and in fact it’s getting worse. There are more public mass shootings in the United States than any other country in the world. According to a CNN report, while the US has 5 percent of the world’s population, 31 percent of mass shootings occur on US soil.

The mass shootings continue at an unprecedented clip.

And yet we hold on to each other in our most difficult times – events like 9/11, war and natural disasters. When tornadoes and floods rip through neighborhoods or you are involved in a traffic accident, who is the first person to help?

Most likely it’s a stranger.

The Red Cross. A fireman. A passing motorist.

We need each other sometimes – no matter race, religion or political view – to know that the unity isn’t lost. There is a value to asking a stranger in need, are you OK? There was a time when young men assisted their elders crossing a street.

In the weeks ahead, our colleagues at the Capital Gazette will need help “crossing the street.” They most likely can’t do it on their own. The support is already pouring in just hours after the deadly shooting.

It’s amazing that the staff at the Gazette accomplished publishing a paper on Friday. It’s editorial page was left blank except for the words, “Today we are speechless.”

We all are.

So we stand together as a country, supporting one another after this latest tragedy which leaves us all wondering, how do we make mass shootings stop? Until we have an answer, we’re left with the duty of standing united with friends and strangers alike even in the worst of times.

The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch

We are better than this.

We are better than the deadly attack that rocked a quiet newsroom Thursday afternoon in Annapolis, Maryland, putting five victims on their own front page and on our national consciousness.

We know we are better than this because we see and report stories daily of people who are working to make their communities better. We honor Everyday Heroes and cover individuals and groups who are striving for civility and compassion. Some are just doing their jobs. Some go beyond expectations in service to others.

And too often — more and more it seems — we must also tell stories of those whose actions are driven by hate, by intolerance, by impulse and by demons most of us can’t fathom.

This senseless violence must stop. Not just because it has struck a chord with us as journalists but because its growing frequency threatens to numb all of us to what is right and true.

And it threatens to muzzle our ability to freely express opinions, to question what is and to strive for what could be.

This newspaper and the journalists who toil here are saddened by the loss of life at The Capital Gazette, and we are also inspired by the survivors’ determination to carry on.

As Dispatch Editor Alan D. Miller said in a memo to our newsroom on Friday, “Five of our colleagues in journalism are dead — gunned down while doing their jobs. We mourn their loss, the loss to their colleagues and families, and the loss to their community.

“I can think of no better way to honor them than to continue to do good journalism. As journalist Ida B. Wells said so long ago, 'The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.'

"We hold that light.”

The values that this nation was founded on, that we celebrate this coming Independence Day, are as important as ever — the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness for all. We cannot let fear of confrontation and disagreement keep us from pursuing truth, not as journalists and not as individuals.

Rather than let differences separate us, we must recommit to being open to diverse views, to seek to understand others and to avail ourselves of opportunities to learn what is happening in our communities, our nation and our world.

The challenge for all of us is to recapture civility and to model for the rest of the world what it means to live in a free country.

Columbus already recognizes the need for this movement, as demonstrated through ongoing work of the Columbus Partnership to promote civility and the Columbus Foundation to promote understanding through the Big Table.

As journalists, we will not shrink from our responsibility to hold a mirror to our communities and to try to help make sense of the news through editorials, letters from readers and a variety of columnists’ opinions. We share our own views and those of others to promote conversation, learning and understanding.

We know from the feedback we receive that some of you do not agree with everything we print, and that’s OK. We hope you all appreciate having access to new business development and government actions, to crime reports and uplifting features, to sports articles that go beyond wins and losses, and to diverse perspectives on opinion pages.

Your right to know drives us, and it always will.

Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald-Journal

The journalists at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, showed their dedication and commitment to their profession when they put out a paper Friday, the day after five of their co-workers were killed in their newsroom.

It was both a terrible day for journalism in America and a great day because of their example.

When a gunman attacks your workplace, killing several of your friends and colleagues, it would be easier, and normal, and probably healthier to go home, curl up in a ball and weep. The best advice would probably be to rest, to recover and to mourn.

The surviving reporters, photographers and editors of the Capital Gazette continued working. They were not able to shrug off the pain and the grief. Their words clearly show that. "We are heartbroken, devastated. Our colleagues and friends are gone," Editor Rick Hutzell said.

But there was a huge story in their city, and their job was to inform their community about that story. What most people may not understand is that it is more than a job. It is a calling, a passion.

If these people had been making widgets, they probably would have left the production line, which would have been closed down during the investigation and cleanup.

But journalists don’t just produce a product for sale. They serve their communities. They find the truth about issues and events that the community needs to know, and they tell those stories.

Journalists have had to contend with some pretty bad times over the past couple of decades. The newspaper business is changing and contracting rapidly. Newsrooms have faced massive layoffs and cutbacks, but the people who remain, in communities all over the nation, have struggled valiantly to keep their communities informed.

Journalists don’t make much money. They have almost no job security. They constantly have to learn new skills to keep up with digital evolution. They don’t work regular hours.

And lately, they are bombarded with criticism from those who expect the news to reinforce their existing opinions. They are denigrated as “the enemy of the people” when nothing could be further from the truth.

There are few reasons to do these low-paying, insecure, long-hour jobs other than a dedication to serving the community. Journalists at community newspapers are uniformly intensely dedicated to covering stories and informing their readers.

Never was that dedication better displayed than in the Capital Gazette staff’s production of their Friday issue.

When Adolph S. Ochs took control of The New York Times in 1896, he issued an announcement that has been taken as a motto for news people ever since. He declared that his newspaper would “give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved … .”

Newsrooms across the country have endeavored to deliver the news without fear or favor despite the current business and political climate surrounding them. There is likely to be more fear in newsrooms now, but America’s journalists will carry on, trying to live up to the example set by the Capital Gazette.

Alan Rosenberg, The Providence (R.I.) Journal executive editor

I think it was the faces that really hit me. The photos of the five people killed at the Annapolis Capital Gazette.

They looked familiar, as though they could have been my co-workers here at The Providence Journal. And reading their biographies, I felt as though I had actually known them.

John McNamara, the longtime sportswriter who loved covering high-school games and athletes. Gerald Fischman, the quirky editorial writer who found love late in life with a Mongolian opera singer. Wendi Winters, the community-news writer who also was a mother of four. Rebecca Smith, the sales assistant just starting out. And Rob Hiaasen, the editor who also wrote a column.

Variations on all these people work here, or have worked here over the years. I’m one of them.

Maybe that’s part of the reason this felt so personal.

Like most people who work in news for any length of time, I’ve learned to tamp down my emotions when dealing with horrific stories. We get clinical in our discussions, the better not to have to confront the reality of these events.

But there was no hiding from the impact of this one.

Because there was more: from what we know, the shooter had a vendetta against the paper because it had written a story about his guilty plea seven years ago for criminal harassment.

That, too, struck a chord. Newspapers often make people angry because they accurately report what those folks would prefer to keep hidden. So people call us or email us, demanding that we change or remove our story.

Sometimes, there’s a threat involved.

We tell ourselves that in covering the story, we’ve done the right thing — and generally, we have. In those cases, we explain why we can’t make a change. And we shrug off the threat. It’s part of the job; it comes with the territory.

But in the back of our minds — at least, in the back of my mind — there’s a part that wonders: will this be the person who follows through?

For some of us, too, Thursday’s events evoked memories of a shooting here in Providence, in 2002.

That was when a 20-year employee at our own printing plant killed two co-workers and wounded a third before taking his own life.

The circumstances — friends and family said he’d complained about being harassed at work, but company and union officials said there was no evidence to support such a claim — were different. But the impact here was deep and lasting.

As events unfolded in Maryland, more than one reporter recalled that day.

So as the story progressed, I found myself reading each update, wanting to know more about all of it.

The victims, the shooter, the circumstances.

And the determination of the Annapolis paper’s staff to publish Friday’s paper, even in the face of this all-too-imaginable tragedy.

Then I went to the gofundme page that’s been set up to help the victims and made a small donation. It’s what I’d want someone to do for us, if — God forbid — it came to that.

“You okay after this newspaper shooting?” my daughter texted me from California on Friday. “Must feel close to home.”

Yes. Yes, it does.

The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle

As has been our lot in recent years, another mass shooting — and multiple smoking guns afterward.

The man accused of fatally shooting five journalists in their newsroom in Annapolis, Md., Thursday had raised flaming, fluttering red flags in front of several folks in the years leading up to the attack: One woman who was allegedly stalked by 38-year-old Jarrod W. Ramos warned police that he was a “nut job” who “will be your next mass shooter." And after the Capital Gazette in 2012 reported on his stalking conviction, and he lost a frivolous defamation case against the paper but kept his grudge going, an editor recalls surmising, “I was seriously concerned he would threaten us with physical violence. I even told my wife, ‘We have to be concerned. This guy could really hurt us.’”

When are we going to listen?

This time, the story is told by the victims themselves: The Capital Gazette, while picking up the pieces of its shattered life and mourning its fallen colleagues, heroically determined Thursday night, "Yes, we’re putting out a damn paper tomorrow.”

It is the worst shooting of journalists on American soil, and brought to mind the even worse attack on Paris weekly Charlie Hebdo, which killed 12 in 2015.

American journalists, wrapped in the Kevlar of the First Amendment, have historically been allowed to do their jobs as up-close observers of life’s most dicey and dangerous moments. Pray they continue to be — for their safety and for the freedom of all.

The Beaver County (Pa.) Times

Another mass shooting in America, this one directed at journalists of The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., and once again we are left grieving and speechless.

Whatever the motivations of the despicable madman who took five innocent lives, the fact is that these victims were simply doing their jobs, thankless though those jobs may be in the current climate of verbal and online attacks on the media.

President Trump routinely refers to media outlets as purveyors of “fake news” when he disagrees or simply dislikes what is reported. He told Americans that media members were enemies of the people, a threat to democracy.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Community journalism is the bedrock of freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment. Reporters and photographers at smaller publications may not be rewarded with Pulitzer Prizes or nationwide fame, but their work provides important information about local schools, governing bodies, police actions and the courts. And yes, local journalists help shine a light on injustices and corruption.

The Capital Gazette, like The Times and other small newspapers across the country, is committed to its community. We didn’t personally know the victims of this horrific shooting, but we’re certain they did their jobs because it mattered to their readers.

It mattered so much that the survivors of the shooting went straight to work as journalists and covered the story. We cannot imagine how they were able to report on a tragedy that so directly impacted them, but they produced an extraordinary account of what had to be their worst nightmare.

Gazette staffers showed they not only cover the community, but are part of it. That’s the way it is in community journalism. Take a look at Times employees and you’ll see people who are active in local youth sports activities with their children; people who are involved with their churches and schools; people who generously volunteer their time to make their communities better.

We are not the enemy of the people. We are the people. And we care about our community and its residents as much as anyone else.

Most important, we will continue to do our jobs because we remain committed and dedicated to the premise that a democracy cannot survive without a free press to protect it.

Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune

Our hearts go out to the family, friends and colleagues of the five people gunned down at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, on Thursday. This attack in particular strikes close to home for us at the Tribune because it was more than a cowardly attack on random people. It was an attack on the institution of journalism and freedom of the press.

Thursday’s attack could just as easily been at any newspaper, including ours. Several members of our staff have been threatened at various times during our careers. In fact, most reporters are threatened at some point if they stay in the field long enough. We mostly shrug off these threats, telling ourselves it’s just angry readers venting. Perhaps this outlook needs to change.

We won’t waste ink publishing the suspected shooter’s name. It was a barbaric, cruel and cowardly act. His name will not be immortalized on this editorial page. The victims, however, must be remembered. Robert Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara and Wendi Winters worked in the Capital Gazette’s newsroom. Rebecca Smith worked in advertising.

The suspected shooter, we’ve since learned, was a disgruntled source of a column published seven years ago based on factual information provided by the courts and others. The suspect filed a lawsuit against the newspaper that was dismissed. This is what authorities believe led up to Thursday’s shooting.

Those who threaten the press will never win. We won’t allow it. Just like the staff at the satirical French weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo after 12 people were killed in January 2015, Capital Gazette staff immediately went to work after the shooting. Reporters sat in the back of a pickup truck parked across the street from their office, which had been turned into a crime scene. We hope in the days and weeks ahead they find time to mourn, but yesterday was not that time. Duty called.

That’s how journalists work. If you want to ensure something is printed, make threats that it not be. If you want to renew our conviction, attack our institutions. The willful defiance of tyranny runs in our veins. There is only one way to do our jobs: with courage and conviction. The meek don’t stick around newsrooms for very long.

Capital Gazette reporter Chase Cook tweeted shortly after the attack: “I can tell you this: We are putting out a damn paper.”

We’re proud of their response, and emboldened by the courage and commitment they’ve shown.

Some call us the enemy of the people. These individuals don’t understand the true enemy: the absence of ideas and viewpoints. America wasn’t built with screaming matches. It was built by civilized debate.

We are not your enemies. And we are not your friends. We are more than either. We are your historians as history is being made; we are your conscience during times when you prefer not to have one; we are your protectors when your rights are threatened; and we are a reflection of this community and all who reside in it.

Some industry folks call a daily newspaper the daily miracle because of the arduous process that goes into every edition, every day. Really it’s more of a daily gift from us to you because we care so damn much, and putting out a paper each day is how we show it.

Newport (R.I.) Daily News

One was an “old-fashioned journalist,” another living out his dream as a sportswriter. There was a columnist, a reporter and a sales assistant. No matter their roles, these five people showed up to work each day at The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, ready to churn out another newspaper.

Until Thursday.

A gunman, believed to be 38-year-old Jarrod M. Ramos, burst his way into the newsroom and began shooting. Four journalists — Rob Hiaasen, Wendi Winters, Gerald Fischman and John McNamara — and sales assistant Rebecca Smith were killed. Two others, Rachael Pacella and Janel Cooley, were injured.

Of the four journalists, the youngest was 56-year-old McNamara, the sportswriter. When they began their respective paths in journalism years ago, the world was a different place. The newspaper was read cover to cover by most people, an honest account of the previous day’s happenings.

But along the way things changed. The internet exploded, creating less demand for newspapers, many of which lagged behind the times. Newsroom staffs were slashed because of budget cuts; workloads got heavier. Still, these four journalists — with decades of experience — carried on with their duties.

Until Thursday.

There are similarities and connections between Annapolis and Newport. Both are sailing-mad cities with a naval presence. The National Sailing Hall of Fame very well could be moving north from there to here.

What they also have in common is each city has a small newspaper that employs dedicated reporters, editors and photographers. For many, there is no time clock, no 40-hour work weeks. It’s a job with a deadline that needs to be met every day. Journalists don’t get into this business to get rich, and they don’t do it for the accolades. These days, working for a small newspaper is a labor of love.

Not much is known about the suspected gunman. According to the Baltimore Sun, he burst into the newsroom by shooting his way through glass doors. People went scrambling, with one report saying an employee jumped over a dead body to escape. Ramos’ motive is believed be a vendetta he held against the paper for a 2011 article involving a criminal harassment charge against him.

In 2012, Ramos filed a defamation suit against the paper, which made its way to the state Supreme Court. A ruling in 2015 was upheld in favor of the newspaper.

“I remember telling our attorneys, ‘This is a guy who is going to come in and shoot us,’” said Thomas Marquardt, the paper’s former editor and publisher, who was named as one of the defendants.

That’s beyond frightening, to think that simply because a journalist was doing his or her job, reporting the news, a gunman would enter the building and start shooting whoever is in sight.

This is not lost on us in The Daily News newsroom. Here, we have an open-door policy, unlike at many newspapers. People can enter the double doors that lead to the newsroom, ask questions, bring in their announcements and talk to the reporters and editors. We consider ourselves the voice of this community and we enjoy interacting with those who live here.

We’ve been yelled at by angry people, have even joked darkly about how vulnerable we would be to a violent attack. But it remained unfathomable that a gunman actually might enter and begin shooting.

Until Thursday.

There is a certain stigma surrounding newspaper reporters. They are criticized for what appears in the pages and at times dehumanized. They’re not out to “ruin lives.” They simply present the facts and allow readers to form an opinion based on those facts.

Perhaps the most incredible part of Thursday’s tragedy is the fact The Capital Gazette published an edition on Friday. “5 shot dead at The Capital,” a banner headline read, with pictures of those killed. That front page serves as a reminder of the grit, determination and professionalism of journalists at a small newspaper — reporters writing through tears after watching five of their colleagues get gunned down, but still knowing the job must be done.

This isn’t written to rail against gun control — though it was reported by the Associated Press that the gun used was purchased legally — or President Donald Trump’s continuous attacks on the media.

This is written to champion the fine journalists at local newspapers across the country with small staffs — which are getting smaller and smaller every day — who believe they are doing their part to inform their community. Employees at The Capital Gazette felt they were doing that in a safe environment.

Until Thursday.

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